Traditional enterprise datacenter networks may be susceptible to software crashes and unplanned outages. Multiple, different software releases across switch platforms can make deploying new features and services a lengthy and time-consuming process. Additionally, the manual configuration used within certain datacenter networks may result in configuration errors, which may compromise network uptime or availability.
Existing network operating systems may operate based on customized operating system kernels having state information distributed throughout the system or perhaps embedded within the kernel. In such systems, the software state may be maintained using synchronous or asynchronous polling that checks state every few milliseconds or seconds on every interface and internal data structure. The polling mechanism may result in wasted cycles, as well as possible deadlocks and/or race conditions during the occurrence of multiple concurrent events. In some existing systems, changes in state may be handled by custom crafted code-paths that enable software processes to react in a tightly ordered sequence depending on the underlying event, which may result in reliability issues due to the difficulties in testing all possible code-paths, which can result in long development and extended customer test and qualification cycles.